The dark rushes
into my lungs.
With each breath,
I imagine I
become more nothing.
The longer I’m
still, the more
I rhyme with
the vast dark
and know myself
as the mystery
that holds everything.
Posts Tagged ‘solstice’
Standing in the Dark on Winter Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, everything, nothing, solstice, three-word lines on December 21, 2025| 2 Comments »
Before Winter Solstice, I Remember
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, night, solstice on December 17, 2024| 5 Comments »
This, too, is what we are born for,
this waking in darkness, unable
to see, but still able to hear the shush
of wind in bare branches, able to feel
the charge of our heartbeat, the swell
of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.
I have spent my life learning to love
these shapeless hours before the light
finds us, these shadowsome nights when
my whole being seems to stretch beyond
the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,
beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,
as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,
the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds
this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.
Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness
calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,
remember, remember where you come from,
remember what you are. And the darkness
inside me sings back.
Dark Night
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged night, solstice on December 22, 2023| 4 Comments »
The long night slips into the room.
It swirls around the dinner table
Night wraps around the light
of the candles. There is nothing
in the home it does not touch.
Even the bright music.
Even the scent
of cinnamon and cloves.
Even the ache.
It travels into our hands,
our dreams, our speech,
our song, our toes.
It becomes us,
becomes the reason we pray,
the reason we learn how to sing.
On the Winter Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, light, opening, solstice, sun on December 21, 2023| 9 Comments »
Let’s reach toward each other
with gazes gentle
as midwinter sun—
with a seeing so generous
we can’t help but turn
toward the other
to let ourselves be seen.
There are many reasons
to close, to shut down.
But when we meet
with such light in our eyes,
then we open together
like December dahlias,
soft and many petalled,
open like bird song
after a long, mute night.
Shift
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged change, day, night, solstice, summer on June 21, 2023| 6 Comments »
On the longest day of the year,
my mother and I sit on her back porch
and wade into worlds where we disagree.
I watch the surface of the lake—
how the reflection changes as day
becomes dusk becomes night,
every moment of it beautiful.
How quiet it is, this shift,
so quiet a woman could miss it.
A Few Days Past the Summer Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged light, pica, solstice, summer on June 24, 2022| 2 Comments »
I find myself storing up on light
the way pikas store summer grass—
leaving it out to dry
in front of their rocky homes.
I store light in poems,
in photographs. I stand
bare skinned in the sun
and store it in memories.
There will be a day five months from now
when I will desperately want to remember
how it feels to stand naked
in the field, held by the warmth
of the sun. So I stand naked in the field,
and if I were a pika, there would be
in front of my door a stack
of golden rays and a dozen
long and sun-drenched days
and the scent of an almost rain.
I know the winter is long. I remember.
I gather more light, more light.
On the Longest Day of the Year
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, light, patience, solstice on June 22, 2022| 8 Comments »
There is comfort in knowing
that every year
since the earth was made
there has been
a longest day of the year—
a day when half of all life
wakes to an abundance of light
and then in that moment
of greatness leans again
toward the dark.
There is comfort in knowing
the light comes, the light leaves,
the light comes, the light leaves,
comfort in knowing
all the light that is
reaches toward us,
whether we can see it or not.
It is simply a matter
of staying out of our own way,
and if we can’t do that,
well, that is what patience is for.
Before Sunrise the Day After the Winter Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged light, solstice, trust on December 23, 2021| 10 Comments »
I don’t know how it is
that before I even open my eyes,
I feel it in my blood—
the small measure of light
that will arrive today.
I marvel how trust in the light
is as powerful
as the light itself.
By the time dawn comes,
already, I am glowing.
One Inner Bonfire
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged bonfire, light, night, solstice on December 21, 2021| 6 Comments »
they invite
new ways of making light—
these longest nights
The Good News
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged possibility, relief, solstice on June 20, 2021| Leave a Comment »
On this longest day
I walk right through
the line of what
I thought was
impossible, hush,
can you hear it,
the sound of fear
as it dissolves
into (oh, beautiful)
sunlight.
June Song
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged meter, solstice, summer on June 16, 2021| 5 Comments »
I wake into the summer light
with summer skin and summer
eyes and breathe the summer’s
perfumed air and wear the sunshine
in my hair; and all around me
summer sings, cicada clicks and
broadtail wings. And evenings
steep in a honeyed glow
that transforms all the world
to gold. And if there is a winter
dream, I cannot find it in this
time when swallows wheel
and all is green and I’m
a wild and summer thing.
Skiing By the River
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged falling in love with the world, solstice, sunrise on December 22, 2020| Leave a Comment »
It is late morning
before the sun rises
over these red cliffs,
Golden halos blaze
behind the evergreens.
What luck on winter solstice
to watch the sun rise twice—
like getting to fall in love
two times with the same lover.
May the sunrise always remind me
to fall in love again with the world.
Every morning may I know the choice
to open the heart and see myself
as the world.
Solstice Surrender
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, solstice, surrender, trojan horse on December 21, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The night is a poem
with verbs of shadow
and nouns of deep,
a poem I never tire
of reading, a poem
that writes itself
into my thoughts,
enters my imagination
like a Trojan Horse—
when its dark ink
overcomes me,
you’d almost think
I was happy
for the ambush,
you’d almost think
I flung wide the gates
on purpose
knowing full well
how the story
would end.
One Devotion
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged darkness, friendship, light, solstice on December 13, 2020| Leave a Comment »
Only one day a year gets to be the longest day,
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged love, solstice, summer, sun on June 22, 2020| 5 Comments »
though during midsummer in Finland, the sun will float
above the horizon line for weeks, and each light-soaked
day seems longest. That is what I wish for you—
day after day of unsetting love, whole months when you feel
the most beloved, the most seen, the most embraced
for exactly who you are. I want to send you
giant bouquets of days, all of them the loveliest,
all of them invitations to feel the most wholly yourself.
And on the shorter days when warmth feels distant,
those are the days I want to remind you that it’s normal
to feel unlovable. It’s normal to feel not enough.
It’s normal to wish (unreasonable though it is)
that those days would disappear and every day could be
the best day, the longest light, the day most soaked with love.
Surprise Grace
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, light, losing the self, loss of the separate self, night, solstice on December 21, 2019| 4 Comments »
And this is the chapter
when it just feels
too much too much
to turn on the light
and so you sit
in the dark.
This is not a myth
in which you are punished,
turned into a tree or a kingfisher—
nor is this the story
in which you discover
your own light.
No, this is the night
in which you are simply
a lifetime of tired
and unable to turn on the light.
And so it’s you
and the night.
It’s you and the night.
And then it’s just the night.
The Power Out
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged book of the dead, candle, darkness, light, poem, poetry, power, solstice on December 22, 2018| Leave a Comment »
and so we rise in darkness
and let our bodies move
without the blare of light.
The house is still and we
are somehow changed
by stillness, changed
by dark. As if we’ve
grown pads in our feet.
As if we are learning
a new silent language
with our limbs, a language
more graceful, more awake.
We find candles. Find
matches. Let the tiny lights
find us. For a thousand years
in Egypt, they wrote
and rewrote The Book
of Emerging Forth into the Light,
a series of writings we somehow came
to call The Book of the Dead.
All the spells were written
to help the dead person journey
through hostile forces
into the afterlife.
And this morning, we
are our only obstacles.
Still, the candles
are a bit like spells,
guiding us with their brilliant ink
toward dawn. There
are no warnings, no judgements,
no naming of evil spirits.
Only this new language
to learn with its syntax
of carbon, it etymologies
of shadow, its phonemes
of coming light.
One in Deep December
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, dark, poem, poetry, solstice on December 18, 2018| 3 Comments »
the night asked me
to read its poetry, all that ink
scrawled across the world—
reading late without the light,
I, too, become page, poem
Almost to Solstice
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dark, light, poem, poetry, solstice on December 2, 2018| Leave a Comment »
There is a light and it never goes out
—The Smiths, There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
And even in these darkest days
in the darkest rooms
with the darkest thoughts
and the darkest words
with the darkest songs
in the dark-full ears
and when the darkening dreams
weights the darkest fear
even then there’s a light
and it never goes out,
even then, when the eyes
know only doubt, even then,
even then, there’s a hand
eager to spill shine
into our cup and all
we need to do is drink,
then pour a bit of shine
for someone else.